


One house on a high hill

by middlemarch



Category: The Office (US)
Genre: Brothers, Ensemble Cast, Family, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Neurodiversity, Post-Apocalypse, Schrute Farms, family traditions, farming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-18
Packaged: 2019-02-03 19:04:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12754332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Mose had known from the day they walked through the front door but had waited until he knew Dwight would agree.





	One house on a high hill

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [This Colder Air](https://archiveofourown.org/works/456580) by [Annakovsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annakovsky/pseuds/Annakovsky), [Kyra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kyra/pseuds/Kyra). 



He’d always had a soft spot for Mose. A baby who never cried, a child who never interrupted, hardly spoke a word, who trembled in delight at the way the freshly plowed furrows stretched in straight lines from the edge of the field to the horizon—Dwight couldn’t have asked for a better brother. They’d been content before the world ended, the two of them on the farm, Angela a rare visitor, and now Dwight was sure _content_ was the last word either of them would choose to describe how they felt. The farm-house, which had once been pleasantly empty, even the dust-motes sparse in the sunlit air, was now crowded, two or three to a room, always someone around a corner, breathing, moving something that was supposed to be kept just so, asking inane questions and carrying on endless conversations that only kept them from doing the necessary chores. And when they actually did the chores, they were terrible at them. So terrible Dwight had almost thought they were faking to try and get out of the work, except for when he looked in Pam’s eyes and saw she knew what a failure she was. He’d found himself patting her on the shoulder and nodded when Mose showed her again and again where to put the bucket, how to fold her fingers around a teat, how to sit back on the milking stool slow, so old Adelgunde wouldn’t startle and kick over the milk.

Mose had come to him shortly after dawn, about eight weeks after the Scranton contingent had arrived, picking a time of day when it was likely to only be the two of them awake. Sasha would be up, because she was a child, the smallest child there with big, staring eyes that reminded Dwight of an octopus documentary, but the adults slept until wind-up alarms woke them. Or until they couldn’t convince themselves, force themselves to keep dreaming any longer, of Big Macs and lattes and electric blankets, neon rainbow stacks of Post-its, heavy down coats brought out for the winter smelling of mothballs, elevators that went up and down instead of hanging inside dark buildings like coffins. Mose had known Dwight would be alone in the kitchen, looking over the field, seeing it and not, the morning not so different from a thousand before. Mose had come and asked a question and for the first time, Dwight had known his brother had already decided the answer.

“In Mutter’s family Bible? Mose? You can’t be serious!” Dwight had exclaimed but it had been a stupid exclamation, he knew that, because Mose was never anything but serious and Dwight supposed Mutter might well take his side. She had married in and had not had the Schrute iron in her soul. Her hands had not been soft but they could be gentle.

“It’s right,” Mose had said. Nothing else, but he’d tilted his head towards the ceiling briefly, reminding Dwight about Angela upstairs and Bob and Phyllis crammed into a bed that was just nearly a double, the flurry of steps that meant Sasha was running through the hall, probably to get the sweater she called Marwa-mally. There was the even creak of Pam’s footsteps on the stairs; she always paused on the second to last one as if it took her that long to remember…everything.

“I will allow it,” Dwight had said. Michael and Jim and Ryan would all have thought he was only agreeing, deigning to agree; none of them would have recognized the formal Schrute benediction, which now belonged to him alone, the eldest living male of the line. 

“But you must ask Pam to help, Mose. Mutti’s Bible—Pam is the one to do it,” Dwight had added. Mose had not grimaced but Dwight knew it would be hard for him. Everything was hard these days—the light and how leaves fell, how ash fell, the line of Angela’s back and bent neck as she prayed on her knees.

“I’ll come with you. Now. We’ll ask her now,” Dwight had said, as close to soft as he could be except when Angela cried without tears for her lost cat, her face buried in his bare shoulder. Her loose hair no longer tickled.

“Are you sure, Mose? I mean, it’s your family Bible. That’s kind of a big deal, even now,” Pam said after Mose asked her, the words dropping from his mouth to the ground like stones. One, two, three they hit the bare floor near Pam’s feet in wooly socks. Pam wore her long blue cardigan in place of a bathrobe every morning and it had started to seem like it was a bathrobe, baggy at the elbows, the cuffs limp around wrists that had become more sharply defined, holding her shape even when she laid it on a chair’s back. She fidgeted with the side with the button-holes. She’d learned not to risk losing a button.

“It’s what’s right,” Mose replied. Dwight saw the conviction in his brother’s chin, in the way he held his hands in the shape that could become a fist. He had never needed to look in Mose’s eyes.

“All of us? Angela, I get that, I mean, she and Dwight…Dwight, are you sure about this?” Pam said.

“It is as Mose says. It’s right. You shall be the one to do it,” Dwight announced.

“You really want me to put all of us, our names, into your family Bible?” Pam repeated. She was halfway to understanding but she always had been. With the milking and weeding the garden and a lifetime ago when she had sometimes glanced at him in the elevator and given him a look that was not a frown nor a smile. He had imagined her with her hair in coronet braids like Mutter had worn and a starched apron and her expression had seemed right. 

“You are family now. You are Schrutes, all of you, and this will always be your home, even if you leave,” Dwight said.

“Even if you never come back,” Mose said and Dwight and Pam both looked at him quickly. He had never sounded sad before and neither of them knew what it meant. 

“Why me? Because I was the secretary?” Pam asked, her initial concern still poorly masked by the question that would have suited a different woman, one she’d never been.

“Because you are an artist. Because you will know how to make the names fit in Mutti’s Bible,” Dwight replied. He hadn’t liked much of Pam’s artwork, but he could appreciate she was the one best suited to write the strange names down and make them seem like they had always been there, James Matthew Halpert next to Ignatius Schrute, Phyllis Vance grafted effortlessly onto the branch hung heavily with Hermine and Frauka.

“Oh,” she said and it was assent enough. Mose handed her the fountain pen, warm from his pocket, and she took it without touching his hand. That gesture, more than any other, made Dwight relax. Mose did not need the reassurance because he had never doubted.

“Come now,” Mose said and Dwight nodded. Pam didn’t pause this time or ask another question, she didn’t bite her lip. Mose had been right. She was a Schrute now and she was ever and always home.

**Author's Note:**

> This is an outtake and an homage to the lovely, wonderful Mosepocalypse series. The title is taken from the same poem used in "This Colder Air." I hope I've captured my own version of Schrute-y-ness as well as the original's. Edited to add: apologies for not remembering that Mose is Dwight's cousin and not brother. Let's say this AU makes him his brother instead, shall we, and spare me the attempt to re-write it enough to account for him being a cousin? I don't think it really detracts from the story all that much but I do hate it when there is a continuity break and it's not even accounted for. Mea culpa!


End file.
